This episode grew out of a post that long-time friend of the podcast, Dr. Laura Froyen, published in a respectful parenting group that we both work in as admins. In the post she asked people to share how they felt before and after they discovered respectful parenting, and then she created a word cloud of the results.
The words in the 'before' cloud were perhaps predictable - things like 'worried,' 'overwhelmed,' 'resentful,' and 'guilty.'
And the most common word in the 'after respectful parenting' word cloud?
Exhausted.
What on earth is going on here?
In this episode I explore five important reasons why respectful parenting is so hard - and what to do about each of them.
 
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Jen 00:03
Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives. But it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research on principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head on over to your YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. ou can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.
 
Jen 00:53
Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. In this episode, I want to talk about something that's been bothering me for a while, which is why we find respectful parenting so hard. And this idea actually came from a poll that Dr. Laura Froyen ran in an online parenting group that we both help to moderate where she asked people to describe how they felt about parenting before and after they discovered respectful parenting. And then she made the responses into a word cloud. The most prominent words in the word cloud from before parents discovered respectful parenting were worried, overwhelmed, resentful, and guilty. And some of the most prominent words in the word cloud from after parents discovered respectful parenting, we're confident, loving, empowered, calm, hopeful and relieved. But the most prominent word was exhausted.
 
Jen 01:39
And I just thought, "What's UP with that?!", and then "Does it HAVE to be this way?." And that was almost a year ago. And that idea has been percolating in my brain since then. And every once in a while I would jot down ideas about why this was the case. And I'd like to walk through those, and also give us some ideas for how to move forward. Because I think there are five reasons respectful parenting can be hard, but I don't believe it has to be hard.
 
Jen 02:04
Let's look at the first of the five reasons why respectful parenting can be exhausting, which is that we're essentially trying to reparent ourselves while we're trying to raise our children differently from the way we were raised.
 
Jen 02:15
Most of us were raised in mainstream homes with parents who were doing the best they could with the tools that they had, some of our parents were physically abusive, because that's the way they were raised, or they were dealing with their own crises. And we challenged them in some way. And they had no idea how else to deal with us. Some of them provided for our physical needs food and shelter, but simply couldn't connect with us emotionally because they'd experienced trauma, or they hadn't had any models themselves for what it's like to connect emotionally with another person, or they had so much going on with just trying to survive, and they just couldn't do it with us. And because our own...